Jóvenes migrantes circulares entre Michoacán y California

Cynthia Mendoza Ríos will present a landscape of the itinerant schooling experiences of children migrating between Michoacán, Mexico, and California. It is based on results from a research project on children’s own narratives about their schooling experiences. The project focuses on a diverse group of 13- to 15-year old, US- and Mexican-born, documented migrant children, who spend five months in small rural hamlets in the municipality of Tangancícuaro, Michoacán, and seven months in a migrant camp in Watsonville, California, where their parents toil as seasonal agricultural workers.

She is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at El Colegio de Michoacán. She is a visiting scholar at the Department of Human Ecology where she works on her dissertation, Jóvenes migrantes circulares entre Michoacán y California: narrativas y experiencia familiar y escolar, 2006-2016, with Professor Luis Eduardo Guarnizo. She was born in Paracho, Michoacán, Mexico. The daughter of migrant parents, Cynthia studied in the United States and Mexico, thus has an inside view of the educational systems on both sides of the U.S.-Mexican border. Her research interests include the education of vulnerable social groups in relation to the effects of migrant children’s cultural practices and identity processes, as well as their family relations, on their academic attainment. In addition to publishing her current work, Cynthia plans to extend her doctoral research as a longitudinal study of these children’s school and migration history.

The Hemispheric Institute on the Americas is an interdisciplinary group bringing together faculty and graduate students that focus on the study of transnational processes in the American Hemisphere.

Our Goal includes promoting research to challenge the boundaries of disciplinary specialization and culture area studies, exploring the connections throughout the social, cultural, and economic landscape of the Western Hemisphere from an array of perspective and redirecting and redefining the study of Latin America from a broadly hemispheric viewpoint.